Monday, January 16, 2017

Since Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is one of the
intellectual pillars of the radical left, that world’s denizens are hard at
work reviving his tattered reputation. And if you want to fight the good
culture war against Anglo-American and Western hegemony you should teach people
to think like Freudians. Or better, to worship at the altar of his greatness. True believers do not worry about facts, that is, about empirical verification.

Cue, French psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco. A fine
biographer, Roudinesco is an intrepid warrior in the culture war. Her work
ranges from hagiography to propaganda. She does not worry that Freudian
psychoanalysis has been widely discredited as a therapy. She understands that,
Freud’s own proclamations notwithstanding, psychoanalysis is not a treatment,
but is a front in the culture wars.

As I explained in detail in my book The Last Psychoanalyst, Freud was creating a pseudo-religion, a
cult that would work to undermine Western civilization, that is, free
enterprise and liberal democracy. If you don’t understand that, you don’t
understand Freud. If you don't believe me, ask any member of the Frankfurt School. Its
Marxist fairy tales are perfectly consonant with Freudian thinking. Check out
Herbert Marcuse, for example.

So, let’s say that your magazine wants to review Roudinesco’s
latest piece of Freudian propaganda. If you do not want to pretend to be
objective you choose someone who is going to gush over the book and who will
advance the cause of radical leftism, to say nothing of radical feminism.

You will choose a psychology professor who has studied
psychoanalysis and who doubles as a woman’s studies professor. That is, you
choose a feminist. Brilliant choice. After all, most feminists know that Freud
is not their friend and that he treated women miserably. It doesn’t matter.

But, make sure that you ignore the fact that Freudian theory
owes much to the European mania about witchcraft. As I argued in my book, Freud
treated his hysterics like witches. He certainly did not cure any of them, but
he lied a lot about doing so. He made up great stories that had nothing to do with the truth.
See the work of Mikkel Borch–Jakobsen on this score.

If you don’t believe me, keep in mind that,today's sophisticated
French psychoanalysts, with Roudinesco’s full support, will tell you with a straight face that
children become autistic because their mothers are frigid. The old refrigerator mother meme, don’t you know?

While British universities are teaching mothers how to help
to treat their autistic children French authorities are trying to remove
autistic children from their homes, and from their bad mothers. If these
mothers are not being treated like witches the term has no meaning. Why a
feminist would find this appealing is beyond me.

And let’s say that the same women’s studies professor is
also associated with a national movement to defend psychiatric patients who
hear voices, that is, who suffer from auditory hallucinations. It is advanced crack pottery… something that can certainly cause damage by persuading
schizophrenics to avoid treatment.

All reputable
psychiatrists, including French Freudians, know that hearing voices is a very
bad sign, often of schizophrenia. For decades they have preferred Halperidol to storytelling.

The radical anti-psychiatry movement, founded decades ago
and largely relegated to the dustbin of history, persists in the form of a few
deluded souls, who believe that hearing voices can be a meaningful experience.

Anyway, if The New Republic or The Nation had chosen a
radical leftist feminist anti-psychiatric thinker to review a book about the radically leftist
founder of psychoanalysis you would not blink. You would expect nothing less.

And yet, reading this propaganda in the pages of the Weekly
Standard shocks and dismays. How could an otherwise fine conservative
publication allow itself to be duped and suckered by the radical left into
becoming a carrier for its pernicious ideas? Conservative thinkers should spend
more time studying the higher reaches of the marketplace of ideas. It would
make them less likely to invite Gail Hornstein to review Elisabeth Roudinesco.
And to advance leftist propaganda.

In any case Hornstein gushes:

Precisely
for the reason that Roudinesco wrote this brilliant new book: because Sigmund
Freud, declared dead more times than anyone can count, is nevertheless very
much alive. And despite the vast profusion of materials by and about him, or
perhaps as a consequence of them, "we have great difficulty knowing who
Freud really was, so thoroughly have the commentaries, fantasies, legends, and
rumors masked the reality of this thinker, in his time and in ours."

She is utterly uncritical:

Scrupulous
and exhaustive in her use of every imaginable source, Roudinesco performs a
huge public service by debunking dozens of errors, myths, caricatures, and
rumors that have long circulated about Freud.

It’s not as though this has never done before. It’s been
done to death. Roudinesco is trying to keep Freud alive and especially to keep
the leftist dream that he is sustaining viable. After all, Communism failed, so
what else does the left have left.

Roudinesco wants to keep psychoanalysis as a pseudo-religion
because everyone knows that as a clinical practice, it’s a bust. One wonders if
Roudinesco quoted Freud’s claim that psychoanalysis was a medical practice designed
to treat neurosis—a bogus and scientistic claim that only dupes still believe.

Why exactly do we need to know who Freud really was? We do
not. The only plausible reason for the exercise is to create a cult figure that
people can worship. It's a good way to overcome rational thinking and free will. In the context of a real religion it’s called hagiography.
Surely, that’s what Roudinesco has in mind. It’s what Hornstein has in mind.
How then did the Weekly Standard get suckered into such an enterprise?

In truth, if you examine the words of Roudinesco’s guru and master,
Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis was a scam. Unless you want to be a cult follower
you should try to know Freud by his works, and his works have properly been
discarded by all but the most inveterate culture warriors.

Roudinesco is nothing if not a serious propagandist. She
still claims that Freud gave hysterics an access to speech. Oh, really. She
does not seem to recognize that the world of French psychoanalysis, the one
from which she issues, does not promote anything that resembles free speech. It
is an indoctrination mill that punishes anyone who deviates from the party
line. If you disagree with Freud good psychoanalysts will denounce you for being anti-Semitic. Doesn't that sound familiar?

Once upon a time I was invited to Argentina—another nation
that has become infested with Freudian theory; how is that working out?—to give
some lectures. I asked the woman who offered the invitation: Can I say what I
want? She replied: Absolutely not. So much for free speech.

As for Freud’s claims to have cured his hysterics, the
research says otherwise. Freud lied about curing his patients but his technique
never really produced positive clinical results. The works of Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen document the point extensively. I have written about some of Freud’s
other cases in my book. To gain the full measure of Freud’s clinical
incompetence check out the case of Horace Frink.

Among the more absurd points in Hornstein’s review is the
claim that Freud always looked strangers in the eye. She says this about a man
who forced his patients to lie down on the couch, so that they could not look
him in the eye. Freud notably declared that he used the couch because he could
not stand being looked at. When you are doing propaganda you do not worry about facts.

And note this piece of nonsense from Hornstein:

Later,
when yet another world war threatened to destroy everything he had done, Freud
stubbornly persisted in thinking that psychoanalysis could "remain
'neutral' in the face of all social change, and thus 'apolitical.'"

True enough, Freud himself remained apolitical. And yet,
making World War II about the whether or not your life work is going to be destroyed
is absurdly grandiose.

As I have said, Freudian psychoanalysis is overpriced
storytelling. People who are thrilled by narratives believe that narratives
allow us to understand ourselves. Hornstein happily embraces the notion. The more time you are spinning our stories that pretend to help you to understand yourself the less time you are in the game.

Whatever false sense of understanding Freud’s tragic stories
provoked, the truth is that the more you get lost in your mind and the more you
spend your time in proposing potential stories for medical conditions—whether auditory
hallucinations or autism—the more you are going to prevent people from receiving
the best available treatment.

It isn’t an accident that France has been denounced over and
over again by the Council of Europe for substandard treatment of autism. As for
the auditory hallucinations that Hornstein thinks are so meaningful, no one in
the Freudian world of France is dumb enough to believe such a thing.

And now, for those who prefer a more sober and less leftist
view of psychoanalysis, this, from Oxford biologist and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, from 1975:

… psychoanalysts will continue to perpetrate the
most ghastly blunders just so long as they persevere in their impudent and
intellectually disabling belief that they enjoy “a privileged access to the
truth.” The opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is
the most stupendous confidence trick of the twentieth century; and, to borrow
an image I have used elsewhere, a terminal practice as well—something akin to a
dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas: a vast structure with radically
unsound design and with no posterity.

Or, as Jacques Lacan put it,
Freud blew it. Lacan added that soon no one will give a damn about psychoanalysis.
He was right. I am confident that Roudinesco will tell you that he did not mean it, did not say it, and if he did, so what.

4 comments:

Stuart: As I have said, Freudian psychoanalysis is overpriced storytelling. People who are thrilled by narratives believe that narratives allow us to understand ourselves. Hornstein happily embraces the notion. The more time you are spinning our stories that pretend to help you to understand yourself the less time you are in the game. Whatever false sense of understanding Freud’s tragic stories provoked, the truth is that the more you get lost in your mind and the more you spend your time in proposing potential stories for medical conditions—whether auditory hallucinations or autism—the more you are going to prevent people from receiving the best available treatment.

I certainly would agree, storytelling is what psychoanalysis is, and if it wasn't overpriced, it might be more useful to society.

I've heard that "ideology" is also about storytelling, but the key difference is ideology demands only one story be true, and calls all other stories heretical, and of course the biggest and best ideologies are religious based, and once you have god on your side, why question anything that doesn't fit?

So for me, while I'd say storytelling is useful, it is NOT useful for identifying objective truth rather it gives us hints our our subjective beliefs, and allows us to go deep enough down the rabbit hole, like to see something of our own hypocrisy, and it gives a mirror to help us when we laugh at the crazy stories other people tell.

My reading task for the week is a book on Narcissism and Donald Trump, a set of old and new essays, and by largely Jungian psychologists rather than Freud.https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1630513954/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00 A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump Paperback – July 26, 2016

Myself, I've always been more attracted to Jungian way of seeing the unconscious, and his "discovery" of archetypes, which I've best heard described as "instincts for humans", patterns of thoughts that enable certain aspects of the psyche to be expressed in the world, and when they are expressed THROUGH the ego, when the ego associates itself AS archetypal though, big problems come out of that.

And the coolest thing about Jungian archetypes is they are NOT "monotheistic", but rather a pantheon of contradictory instincts, all of which enabled our ancestors to survive and pass on their genes.

I didn't pick the name "Ares Olympus" as a self-identification, actually more from astronomy and the planet Mars, but perhaps also the Warrior archetype is most dangerous to me, so its one I try to understand, and find ways to disarm the warrior archetype in others, or at least side-step it, like a matador and his red cape. Many frightened people may want to say "All bulls should be killed" because they are too dangerous, while ritualized violence in killing the bull proves we are the masters.

Its hard to find morality in Jung since his work was more observational than judgmental, but once we acknowledge primal forces like archetypes are both boons and curses, we use our own conscience to rule over them more wisely.

And although Trump is not a bull, his making a virtue of bulling means we've got 4 years ahead of us where people on all sides with bullish impulses who are going to see where that takes them, and if they don't see the archetype behind their new gained power over others, surely the red they see will someone else manipulating them for their own gain, and the fake bulls on all sides can become pawns and fools.

Reason alone simply is not enough here, and stories open the right questions, even if we need many contradictory stories to find out way through the chaos.

He certainly did. As far as I'm aware of the history, Freud was the first in a long line of followers, some now in the field of fMRI neuropsychology (rapidly becoming a modern version of phrenology), attempting to achieve the Materialist goal of rescinding personal sovereignity over thought.

Thank the lucky stars for Albert Ellis:

"The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny."

TW, a good quote. I see Albert Ellis was a founder of REBT (rational emotive behavior therapy), and wikipedia offers a story of his overcoming a fear through willful exposure.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis---Ellis had exaggerated fears of speaking in public and during his adolescence he was extremely shy around women. At age 19, already showing signs of thinking like a cognitive-behavioral therapist, he forced himself to talk to 100 women in the Bronx Botanical Gardens over a period of a month. Even though he did not get a date, he reported that he desensitized himself to his fear of rejection by women.---

And apparently this approach is described as a "shame attack", a way of not letting shame hold us back.http://albertellis.org/shame-eye-beholder/---A shame attack is a very creative intervention used within REBT that is often conducted when the client is self-conscious in social situations. It is conducted by doing something completely ridiculous or outside of “normal” social protocol, without offering any explanation to neutralize the situation. A famous shame attack created by Dr. Ellis is walking a banana on a string in a public space. This exposure and countless others can be performed with the client to demonstrate that we are free to be ourselves. In other words, we can accept who we are without becoming disturbed, attempting to tolerate the discomfort of judgment. One of two things is often discovered after a shame attack: 1) Others either do not notice or do not care about the behavior you are exhibiting; 2) If others do care, nothing terrible happens based on their judgments and you survive.---

It says "One of two things is often discovered", but it doesn't say what else can happen. I do like the condition "without offering any explanation" because if you explain yourself, like "I'm doing a social experiment", then people won't just think you're a fool.

Of course in a world of 7 billion people, you have a lot of room to experiment, and if we shame ourselves too badly in front of any given social circle, we can "move on" to another circle and "reset" our self image as a dignified person who cares what people think of us.

So the lesson here would seem to be to do all your "experimenting" with stranger you don't care about, and then once you've refined your techniques, you can erase your experiments by only interacting with people whom didn't see your shameful behavior.

I can see both the anonymity of a large city, or being online is the ideal place for social experiments, while a harder experiment is to ask what sort of behavior you're willing to experiment on with family, friends, or coworkers whom you can't say "This never happened" and expect them to forget and never mention it again.